SAP dodges German antitrust investigation over data extraction

SAP is not unfairly preventing enterprises from extracting their data from its systems for use with competitors’ applications, the German Federal Cartel Office (Bundeskartellamt) concluded Thursday after a preliminary investigation.

The Bundeskartellamt does not currently intend to initiate abuse proceedings against SAP, although it will continue to monitor developments in what it views as a dynamic market, it said in a news release.

It launched its investigation into SAP’s practices following complaints by software companies including Celonis, a developer of process mining tools, alleging that SAP makes it difficult for customers and third parties to access data from its ERP systems and favors its own Signavio process mining tool.

“Companies must generally also be able to use their own data in third-party applications. With large software platforms, in particular, non-discriminatory access to data is crucial to effective competition,” said Bundeskartellamt President Andreas Mundt. “Our preliminary investigation has found that there are currently sufficient data extraction options available and that there have so far been no indications of exclusionary practices that may be relevant under competition law.”

SAP changed its policies on accessing data held in its applications via APIs in April, prompting customer pushback.

But, said Mundt, the Bundeskartellamt found that despite the API policy change, data extraction options that were previously permissible are still available.

Data extraction is possible

SAP welcomed the Bundeskartellamt decision, saying that “as the authority states, SAP customers and partners have sufficient and permissible technical options to extract data from SAP systems and use it in solutions from other providers. The SAP API Policy does not restrict these capabilities.”

Celonis also issued a statement, noting that the Bundeskartellamt ruling underlined the continued importance of unrestricted data access, and warning, “The decision is based on the key premise that data extraction for software from providers such as Celonis will remain possible even under SAP’s new API policy — a premise that SAP has been unwilling to confirm to date.”

The Celonis statement continued, “We remain steadfast in our conviction that company data belongs entirely to the customers who generate it. No provider should restrict a company’s right to extract its own information or prevent users from working with third-party providers such as Celonis that offer added value to customers.”

Celonis is also attacking SAP’s policies on data extraction in court in California. It filed a complaint in March 2025 alleging that SAP was leveraging its software to “prevent SAP customers from sharing their own data with third-party providers, including Celonis, without paying prohibitively expensive fees.” The judge dismissed some of the claims in that case, but three of them will be tested in a trial scheduled for December 2026.

“Our litigation continues to uncover evidence of SAP’s unlawful behavior, including anticompetitive conduct and theft of intellectual property, and we are confident in the evidence that we will present at trial,” Celonis said following the German authority’s decision.

The Bundeskartellamt’s failure to find sufficient evidence to open a ‘formal abuse of dominance proceeding’ is a small win for SAP, said Scott Bickley, advisory fellow at Info-Tech Research, but “CIOs should not mistake it for a validation of SAP’s data access model.”

Although SAP recognizes customers’ right to decide they use their data, it does not make it easy for them to do so, he said. “CIOs may technically retain vendor choice but be faced with expensive replication architectures, API rate and volume restrictions, additional platform costs, performance lags and data migration costs, all with a dependency on an SAP-approved technical pattern, which can be a moving target.”

Data ownership as a procurement issue

Justin Greis, CEO of consulting firm Acceligence, sees the decision as an instructive one for enterprise CIOs.

“This isn’t a reason to stop asking hard questions of your ERP vendor. Whether it’s SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, Salesforce, or anyone else, enterprises should continue to evaluate how easy it is to access their own operational data, integrate third-party applications, and migrate workloads if business priorities change. Those questions are becoming strategic procurement issues, not just technical ones,” Greis said.

CIOs should consider data portability early in the procurement process, said Kaan Dincer, CEO of data migration vendor Settle: “Negotiate export rights, API access on reasonable terms, and documentation of the data model before signing and test a real extraction while the vendor still wants your renewal. The cost of your eventual exit is set on the day you implement, not the day you leave. ERP data now feeds analytics and automation outside the system of record, so access friction that used to be an IT annoyance is becoming a strategy constraint.”

In the SAP case, he said, “the regulator answered a narrow legal question, not the operational one. Declining to open proceedings means the friction was not shown to be anticompetitive. It does not mean the friction is not real. The Bundeskartellamt’s own findings acknowledge that extracting large data volumes is technically demanding and it said explicitly that it will keep watching as access mechanisms and license models evolve. That is not a clean bill of health. It is a decision to hold fire.”

Srinivasulu Reddy Battu, a senior software engineer with cloud vendor ZT Systems, said the big takeaway is the difference between difficult and impossible. SAP’s argument is that the data migration outside of its environment is possible, but Battu said it can be a time-consuming and expensive process.

“When the ruling says ‘various permissible and viable options’ exist, that’s technically true, but it glosses over how much expertise it actually takes to use them,” Battu said. “CIOs should still watch how process mining gets packaged in their contracts. If Signavio comes included by default, teams will naturally start using it and that quietly reduces your negotiating power with other vendors over time. This isn’t just about SAP: Oracle, Microsoft, every major ERP vendor sits on a massive amount of your business data. If any of them decided to tighten their API policies tomorrow, most companies would be scrambling.”